The current state of the art enables the connecting of a plurality of terminals to a same telephone line having one of its termination points localized in a family home. In such situations, an occupant of the home can get a fairly precise idea of the availability of the other occupants by looking the activities of those who are in his field of vision and listening to and/or verbally questioning those whom he cannot see. He will thus know which occupants are available for a conversation or to perform any other kind of common activity such watching an audiovisual program or playing a video game.
Now, at present in the field of telecommunications, there is an increasingly pronounced interest in the sharing of experiences in communities. This has led certain telecommunications operators to propose single-number services through which a community of users is identified by a single telephone number which is then common to all the users of the community, each user being provided with a portable terminal. In this type of situation, the different members of the community are most often situated at several kilometers or even tens or hundreds of kilometers from each other and are therefore not only unable to see each other but are also incapable of making verbal exchanges of information on their activity and availability, so that the different members of the community do not have information available, in their current one-number services, on the state and availability of the other members of the community. This limits the utility of this type of service and therefore hampers its development.
Moreover, when a communication is presented to the members of a community sharing a same identifier, each of said members must determine whether or not he has to agree to the setting up of the communication thus presented or on the contrary allow another member to take this communication, thus ultimately leading to a sub-optimal situation in which a member of the community picks up the communication before another member who is however the true intended recipient of the communication. It can even happen that none of the members will pick up the communication, each believing that one of the other members is better placed to do it, so that ultimately no communication is established.